


Closer

by jade_maiden_333



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode: s04e17 It's a Terrible Life, Friends to Lovers, Homophobic Language, M/M, Nine Inch Nails, Office Romance, Sandover Bridge & Iron Inc., Suggestive lyrics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-05
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-15 01:04:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9212621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jade_maiden_333/pseuds/jade_maiden_333
Summary: Dean's got a secret admirer and an office full of suspects. Can the music tell the tale?Via theWWM Flash Ficlet Prompt - Week 1 on tumblr: A CD sits on your desk with a post-it on it that says “listen”. You know what it is but not how it got there.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is inspired by Supernatural's It's A Terrible Life episode, but only in passing. There are significant changes.

Dean stared at the CD in his hand, the interoffice envelope it came in sat among the mess of other paperwork he needed to get to today. He picked at the blue post-it with the word ‘listen’ written in block letters. _What the hell?_ He pushed himself up from his desk just enough to peer over his cubicle. A sea of heads bowed over monitors, the buzz of fifty hushed conversations, but no way to tell who left the package on his desk. Leaning back in his chair he scowled at the CD, an iridescent rainbow glinting at him through the jewel case.

He waited until his lunch break to pop the disc into the player at his desk. Music. At least he thought it was music. It began with a scratchy, driving beat. It seemed like the musician intended it to mimic a heartbeat. _Wait_ , he mumbled to himself. _I know this song._  Trent Reznor’s susurrus tenor filled his ears.

_You let me violate you_  
_you let me desecrate you_  
_you let me penetrate you_  
_you let me complicate you_

“Holy shit.” he rasped, accidentally pressing the earpiece deeper into his ear. He stood from his chair again, scouring the office space. No juvenile snickering and/or pointing. He didn’t really think that someone around here would prank him using a Nine Inch Nails cut. Not even good-natured Ian in the next cubicle over. Half of these people wouldn’t know NIN if they sat on them much less taking the time to burn a CD with their music on it. He pressed speed dial number one, calling his best friend.

It rang once, then a familiar low rumble filled his ear. “Novak.”

“Holy crap,” Dean began abruptly. “I’m sitting here holding a friggin’ CD that somebody sent me.” His voice dropped down to a whisper. “I think it’s a message.”

The pause on the line was long enough for him to think he had been disconnected. Then he heard, “Who is this?”

“Cas, I swear to God--”

“Just kidding,” he snorted. “How much coffee did you drink this morning?”

Dean grinned in spite of himself, gazing at a picture on the wall of his cube. Him and Cas grinning over twin beers at Ellen’s bar. The memory widened his smile, heartbeat speeding up in a rush of...he didn’t know what. He smothered a wave of desire for his friend. The last thing he wanted was to make things weird between them. Sandover was a big company and sometimes he was thankful that they worked five floors away from each other. Sometimes.

“I’m cutting back,” he swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. “You know that.”

“I do.” Cas answered warmly. “So, in ten words or less, what’s going on?”

“I think that somebody is...coming on to me.”

“Hello. Have you met you? Who’s _not_ coming on to you?”

“Yeah, I am adorable, but that’s beside the point. I need to know who this is.”

“They didn’t leave a name on the CD?”

“No. Just a post-it that says ‘listen’.”

“You have a secret admirer. How cute!”

“Blow me, Cas. I’m serious.”

A peal of laughter through the phone had him rethinking his words. “That’s not what I meant.” he said, reddening.

“I know,” Cas managed to pull himself together. Barely. “I think you’re missing the point. If they didn’t say who they are, they don’t want you to know.”

“Bullshit,” Dean threw a look over his shoulder, whispering conspiratorially. “Maybe it’s Abby in accounting.”

“Her?” Cas scoffed. “Not a Nine Inch Nails fan. She’s kind of a hip-hop type of girl.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Dean’s replied absently, unconvinced. “What about Anne-Marie on six?”

“Boyfriend.”

“So?”

“So doubtful, Dean.” There was muffled talking, Cas covering his mouthpiece. “Adler is making the rounds. I’ve got to at least look like I’m working,” then affectionately, “Call you tonight?”

“Sounds good.” His voice had gone gooey. _Lock it down, Winchester._ He cleared his throat trying for something more professional. Lower. “Later, Buddy.”

Disconnecting, he drummed his fingers on his desk, thinking. It wouldn’t hurt to call Abby. Just to rule her out. She was a pretty girl. Hot. Still, he admitted, she didn’t exactly set his soul on fire. His eyes slid briefly to the wall photo. Cas gave him a toothy grin. _But that song. Whoever sent that song wanted him bad._ Dean went to his screen, pulling up Abby’s number. _Whoever sent that song wanted to hook up._ He grabbed the disc, twirling it on his finger and tapping her extension on the keypad. _Whoever sent that song--_

He frowned, the disc wobbling to a stop on his finger. _Wait a minute._ He blinked. _Wait a fucking minute._ That song. By Nine Inch Nails. He replayed his conversation with Cas in his head:

_“Holy crap, I’m sitting here holding a friggin’ CD that somebody sent me. I think it’s a message.”_

Color drained from his face. Then filled up again, heated with thunderbolt realization.

“I never said it was Nine Inch Nails.” he said aloud.

“What? You talking to me, Winchester?” Ian’s voice floated over the top of the cubicle.

“What? No, I was talking to--”

His headset clicked, then a woman’s voice tinkled musically into his ear, “Accounting, Abby.”

“Shit.” The disc slipped from his finger, landing on its edge with a padded thunk on the carpet. It rolled away, arcing around his walled partition and into Ian’s area. “Fuck me.” he groaned.

“Excuse me?” she huffed. “Who is this?” she paused and he could feel her eyes locking onto her caller ID. “Winchester? Is that you, Dean?”

“Shit,” he repeated, wheeling around and gawking at the wall photo.

_Cas. The CD was from Cas._

“You all right there, pal?” Ian was leaning over the cubicle, concerned face studying him.

“You’re an infant, Dean.” Abby spat, tinny voice cutting through like ice. “I’m calling HR.”

“Wait--” he said, to the broken connection.

Proffering the disc, Ian said brightly. “Dropped something.”

“I’ll be right back.” Dean plucked it from his hand, bee lining for the elevators.

Shaking his head, Ian mused. “Or not.”


	2. The Green Eyed Monster

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cas is second guessing the whole sexy CD thing. A visit to Abaddon Knight's office doesn't exactly help.

Cas disconnected, pulling a spreadsheet up on his monitor. Once the giddiness of his conversation with Dean ended he sighed and chided himself. It was a dangerous game he was playing. What if Dean didn’t feel the same way? What if he did? This hadn’t been thought through. Dean was the most important person in his life. He could lose his best friend. He sobered, thinking about it.

“Novak.” Adler thread his way through the open space, rheumy eyes zeroing in on Cas from a distance.

“Sir.” Cas palmed his headset off, standing so quickly that his chair shot back into the path of a woman walking the narrow hallway. Hannah.

Cas liked her because she was sweet and funny and told him that workplace romances were awful, yet helped him put that CD on Dean’s desk. When Hannah realized that he only had eyes for Dean, she became friendlier. Coming to his desk when she could have called. She laughed louder, smiler brighter and shouldered him gently when he said something funny. He had somehow freed her up to befriend him, but he wasn’t quite sure how. She caught the chair deftly, moving it back into the cubicle without missing a step. She breezed past giving him a secret smile. It was nice.

“Nice,” Adler sidled up next to him, watching Hannah’s retreat appreciatively. Her hips swayed when she walked. Adler wiggled his brows at the innuendo. “Am I right?”

He made a vaguely agreeable sound. Adler didn’t need to know that he wasn’t interested. At least not in the way his boss’ leer indicated. Looking up at him, Cas felt the sudden urge to wash his hands. Maybe a shower.

“Abaddon Knight needs you up in accounting.” Adler rolled his eyes, exasperated as if to say _Women. What can you do?_ “She needs help with a time sheet, or a crash, or something or other. Hell, I don’t know. Just go up and make nice with her.”

“I’ll head up now.” he answered, a tad too eagerly. Normally he wouldn’t be in a rush to go see Abby. She was off putting and maybe even a little frightening, but he needed to get away from his desk, shake off the anxious energy that thoughts of Dean generated. He leaned over his desk, moving to shut off his monitor, but not before the screensaver blinked into life, a carousel of images drifting by. A grime-covered Dean grinning out from under the Impala’s hood at Bobby’s. Dean grinning around a forkful of pie, Dean beating the crap out of him at pool. His heart gave a pleasant lurch and he forgot all about the creepiness that was Mr. Adler. He pressed the button and the screen went black.

 

 

 

The elevator doors opened revealing Garth. Tall and lanky and the friendliest guy Cas had ever met. He was looking uncharacteristically fed up but brightened when he saw Cas step in.

“Dude, this place gets crazier everyday.”

“Hey, Garth. What’s up?”

“I was just down on four. Dean plowed into me on the way to the elevators.”

“Dean?” Cas shifted uncomfortably. “Was he okay?”

“If running red-faced through the halls and muttering to yourself counts as okay.”

“Where was he going?”

“I don’t know. To a fire? From a fire?” He rubbed at his bony shoulder, messaging it like it was the point of impact. Garth glanced at him, looked away. “I'm kind of hard to miss, you know?”

The doors opened, and Cas hesitated at the threshold before walking out. Dean was normally a pretty cool cucumber. Maybe he should stop by his floor, just to make sure everything was okay. A seed of worry sat in the pit of his stomach. The thought that maybe he’d made a misstep with his best friend caused it to grow. He’d go to him. Right after seeing Abby.

 

 

 

“Finally,” Abby said in greeting. She spun around in her chair in a reasonable imitation of an evil corporate nemesis. Her fingers were steepled under her chin, red lacquered nails flashing as they caught the light. He stepped into the office, looking around. He noticed that bits of her personality lay around the small cramped room. A polished stone mortar and pestle sat on a book shelf, a glass jar of what might have been fresh lavender displayed on the window sill. On the edge of her desk a crystal ball paperweight did nothing to dispel breakroom whispers that the woman had sacrificed a virgin to get her supervisor’s position.

She held his gaze, then seemed to remember herself and visibly softened, smiling tightly through blood red lips. “Thank you for coming up, Cas.”

Goosebumps prickled on his forearms. The temperature was noticeably colder in her office. A black leather jacket draped like a torso over the back of her Herman Miller chair. Studying her, she seemed not only unaffected by the chilly room, but a little heat-flushed. Cas fought an almost overwhelming urge to turn around and leave, but he stood his ground. She was just a weird supervisor. A weird, creepy, chills-down-your-spine supervisor. He swallowed, his throat clicking drily. He mentally pat himself on the back when his voice came out evenly.

“Not a problem.”

But was a problem. It was hard to corrupt a file by accident, yet Abby swore that she didn’t know how she did it. He spent the next fifteen minutes unraveling the Gordian knot of system errors that she caused and with apparently nothing else to do, she pulled up another chair and sat with Cas and talked. About everything, and everyone. Who was dating whom, who was breaking up with whom and who was apparently cheating on whom. He listened with only half an ear, wondering if she knew that supervisors weren’t supposed to be dishing the dirt.

“You’re lucky though, being…” she made a twirling finger motion at her temple. “You know.”

“No, I don’t.” Unfortunately, he was afraid he did, but he’d play her game. “Being what?”

“I just meant--well,” she arched one perfectly threaded eyebrow. “There’s just not many of your type around here.”

The room warmed, or maybe it was just him. “I’m gay, Abby. Not AB negative.”

“It’s too bad really,” she sighed, wrinkling her nose the way he imagined a demonic rabbit might. “You’re cute, in a sort of...deliberately sloppy way. It’s sweet.”

“Thank you.” Cas moved on to rebooting her laptop. He waited impatiently while the system thought about it. Abby leaned back in her chair, it creaked under the sound of her tuneless humming.

“Maybe it’s a gay thing,” she mused. “All the straight guys I know tend to be assholes.”

Cas bit down on the opinion that her problem might not be all the straight guys. Instead, he opted for “You have malware on this thing.” He tapped the keyboard through a series of executions while she shrugged noncommittally and stifled a yawn. He was ninety nine percent sure that she had no idea what malware was. She went on, as if repairing her computer problems was no longer her issue.

“Men are just so...crass.” Her tone changed, like thunder clouds gathering over a summer picnic. She directed a dark glare at him. “Like that Dean Winchester.”

“Dean?” The beginnings of a tic formed at the corner of his right eye at the sound of Dean’s name coming out of her mouth. He had made a mistake. He thought back to that moment when he hesitated at the elevator. No, better yet, the moment when Adler sent him to make this fool’s errand. He should be laughing with Dean over the CD prank, not sitting in Abby’s office, two seconds away from straddling her chair, placing his hands around her neck and throttling the life out of her.

“Do you know what he did today? He pranked called me. Here. At work. Asked me to--he asked me to _do_ things to him.”

“That doesn’t sound like Dean.” he replied evenly.

“Oh, believe it.” she smiled, coyly swiping a lock of crimson hair out of her face. “You don’t know what he's like. Did you know that I actually dated him? It was before the promotion of course.”

Cas did know that Dean had dated Abby. He was reluctant to admit that it might have been part of the reason he disliked her so. But he also knew that he had no claim on the man. Still, he had commiserated with Dean, and watched while he spent three almost unbearable weeks trying to find a face-saving way to break it off with her after the first date. Dating Abby had turned out to be like making a deal with the devil. She made _Fatal Attraction_ look like a romantic comedy.

“The man couldn't keep it in his pants. Ten minutes into our date he'd beg off saying that his friend was sick, or stranded or some nonsense,” Abby waved the idea away like a bad odor. “Friend my ass. A man like that has no friends, unless they’re friends with benefits. You should have seen the look on his face when he talked about her. I’ve never seen someone so...so... _whipped_. Whoever she was, he was ga-ga over her, the dumb lovestruck bastard.”

“That’s enough!” he boomed, voice filling the little room. On the window sill, a single lavender leaf jolted from its cluster, juddering to the bottom of the glass jar like a Plinko chip.

“Huh?” Abby looked up at him like it was the first time she was really seeing him.

“I mean,” he shut his eyes, bringing his breathing back under control. “I just meant that your laptop is ready.”

“You know,” she stared at him, tiny cold eyes, sizing him up. “What they say about you people is true. Straight women just open up to gay men. You’re like a...fag hag version of truth serum or something.” She flashed another grin at him, teeth shark-like. “You and I should hang out.”

He looked at his wrist to check the time. He wasn’t wearing a watch. He didn’t own a watch, but that detail seemed to have escaped him. “I need to get going. Please give I.T. a call if you have any more problems.”

He said that last part by rote. He walked out of the office without another word, hoping to Christ that she wouldn’t call him. He made his way back to the bank of elevators, pressing the down button. He paced the floor, thinking about all the times when Dean showed up at his doorstep, shell shocked and confessing that he had used Cas as an excuse to end one of his dates early. Thinking back, it seemed like every time Dean went out with Abby he found Dean standing at his door right after.

  
Anger, sadness, and fear roiled in thick bright colors in his mind’s eye. Layer upon layer a red, blue, black color palette of emotions swirled and churned, felt deep in his belly, rising and looking for a way out. With effort he calmed himself, breathing and sorting his feelings until he could identify the monstrous emotion they melded into. Another color. Green.

Jealousy.

He stalked over to the panel of buttons breathing heavily, finger jamming the button again.

_“You should have seen the look on his face when he talked about her. I’ve never seen someone so...so...whipped. Whoever she was, he was ga-ga over her, the dumb lovestruck bastard.”_

Abby didn’t know what she was talking about. There was no _her_.

_“...he'd beg off saying that his friend was sick, or stranded or some nonsense…”_

Who was this _her_?

_“Friend my ass. A man like that has no friends, unless they’re friends with benefits.”_

He stopped, chest heaving. Cas was dimly aware that he was standing there, finger poised over the down button, ready to kick the object’s illuminated little ass. Then like the wheels of a seldom-oiled machine, the rusted cog’s of Abby’s words jerked and clunked into place, the motion pulling what was so obvious into sudden, crystal clear focus. Oh my God.

_Me. He’s ga-ga over me._

The elevator pinged. He heard the telltale rattle of the car reaching his floor, then a whoosh of the elevator doors opening. Peering into the recess of the elevator, he moved to step in.

Dean Winchester’s surprised green eyes blinked back at him. He was holding the CD, smiling sheepishly.

“What’s the word, Cas?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you [Powerfulweak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Powerfulweak) and [JiniZ](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JiniZ) for your betawork. And talking me off the ledge.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on the [Tumblr](http://metatron-the-transformer.tumblr.com/). Don't be a stranger.


End file.
